Saving Lives With Soap

Ever wonder what happens to the bar of soap you use at a hotel. It is just thrown away. The bar of soap may be insignificant, but in some nations people die because they don’t have access to a simple hygiene product that we take for granted. Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee says, “One of the most common kinds of illnesses in the world are those that are transmitted from person to person and to oneself because of germs that are on one’s hands.”. Shawn Seipler decided to do something about that.

Mr. Seipler is the CEO of a non-profit project called Clean the World. Clean the World is a project that takes used soap bars from hotels, recycles them, and donates the new soap bars to countries in need. The idea came to Seipler one night while he was staying in a hotel as a tech company employee. “I picked up the phone and called the front desk and asked them what happens to the bar of soap when I’m done using it. They said they just threw it away.” he said. Clean the World has grown from a tiny operation to giant organization.

Recycling to soap is pretty easy. The soap is shredded, cleaned, formed into new bars, and packaged.

Clean the World has recently partnered with Global Soap to make a bigger difference in the world. Together, the group has collected used soap from more than 4,000 hotels and has delivered some 25 million bars to 99 countries.